


Teary-Eyed: A Parody

by transmarkwatney (felilivargas)



Category: The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 08:28:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11158083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/felilivargas/pseuds/transmarkwatney
Summary: Mark Watney finds a smut fanfic about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in Johannsen's personal files. Bored as all hell, he decides to read bits and pieces of it now and then out of sheer boredom. He feels regret.





	Teary-Eyed: A Parody

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, to the user who wrote the original fanfic: no hard feelings. I mean it. Your writing is really quite nice, and the fic is impressively long for a one-shot of such nature. Also, you've granted me and my friends plenty of amusement, plus inspiration for me to get off my ass and write something. (I mean, Mark is pretty rude about the fic in this, but from one author to another, no hard feelings. I don't judge.)
> 
> Also, to anyone who's fictionkin with Mark, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

**LOG ENTRY: SOL 59**

A while ago, when I was digging through the crew's entertainment files, I found an old text file in Johannsen's stuff. Like, really old. It was from Archive of our Own, this really old, well, archive of fanfiction that became defunct in the mid-2030's. I mean, it's still accessible in archives, ironically, but it's not like it's particularly a goldmine of fanworks.

Like any completely open community for fan-authors, Archive of our Own (or Ao3, as it's been dubbed, for reasons I never completely understood) has a lot of junk. I mean, a lot of junk. And, well, a lot of it is gay porn. I mean, there's some straight porn too, but bottom line: it's full of porn. Some of it dates back to as old as 1997, and, frankly, a lot of the older stuff is better written, since someone was clearly invested in it enough to save it. But a lot of it is just teenage authors learning to write and putting their stuff out there for the sake of the validation of a thumbs-up or whatever like system Ao3 used.

So you can understand my suspicion when I found something from Ao3 in one of my old crewmembers' entertainment files. I mean, I can't judge them for being nerds. But Ao3?

But, desperate for something that wasn't from the 1970's, I decided to open it up to see what it was.

Bad idea. Absolutely horrible idea.

You know, before I tell you what's so bad about it, I figure I might as well count my blessings. For one, just from the first couple of paragraphs, it seems like the thing is at least pretty well written. It's clear that someone put a lot of effort into it. I don't know why, given the subject matter, but I can give them some credit for giving enough of a fuck to sit down and read it multiple times over. With a lot of fanfiction communities, you get a lot of work where you wonder if the publisher even knows where a period goes, or how to press “shift” and capitalize the start of their sentences. Also, as much as I hate what it's about, I figure if I can't sit through it all in one sitting, that it'll give me more time that it'll take to get through it, right? Yay, more ways to waste time while I'm waiting for potatoes to grow!

But holy fuck.

Like, holy fuck.

Someone on the internet actually sat down and wrote porn about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

And by “sat down,” I don't mean they sat down once and wrote it for shits. No, they pretty clearly put a lot of time and effort into it, more time and effort than any normal person would do out of irony. Someone out there was sexually attracted strongly enough to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin that they sat down and decided to write an almost 5,000 word prose piece about them having sex. Oh, my god. I feel sick.

I'm gonna be honest. I don't even know what my sexuality is. But whatever it is, it's pretty strongly not fucking this.

That's the other horrible thing. Knowing Johannsen would read this, and enjoyed it enough to bring it all the way to another fucking planet...

Alright, be back in a few minutes. I genuinely feel sick. I'm gonna go lay down and see if I can forget what the hell I just read.

**LOG ENTRY: SOL 59 (2)**

Guess whose memory is still fully fucking functioning!

First two men on the moon. Having sex. Written for someone else's pleasure. And Johannsen _liked_ it! I'm gonna cry.

Alright, so I didn't just lay down. I laid down in my bunk for a bit, then figured the more I thought about it, the more it would get ingrained into my memory.

So I checked on the potatoes. Sprout by sprout. I have to give myself credit, my potato growing plan was pretty damn clever. All the potatoes are happy and healthy. Nothing really worth reporting there. Checking on them ate up a good 20 minutes of my time, though. Turns out, when you're trying to distract yourself from finding horrible Apollo 11 fanfiction in your friend's entertainment files, you can give a pretty good inspection of your crops. I mean, they didn't really need one. There's no bugs to clean off or anything particularly dire. But still, good to know they haven't all mysteriously died of some unprecedented Martian famine I should have predicted.

So I ran diagnostics on all of the HAB's systems. I figured it couldn't really hurt. It's a lot of tedious computer work, but time-consuming and thought-consuming is always a good way to ignore awful things you never needed to be aware of, like the existence of porn of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and the fact that someone probably genuinely got off to reading it. (Hey, future NASA historian reading this, if you're laughing at me about the age old rule 34? Go fuck yourself.) Anyways, nothing new to report. Everything's working fine. Nothing new has gone horribly since the Great HAB Explosion of Sol 40. The water reclaimer was running a little less efficiently than I expected it to, and I figured something was clogging the pipes, so I took it apart, cleaned it, and put it back together, and now it's working like a charm. It figures that it needed a cleaning. I mean, NASA probably didn't design it to clean out the air from a flourishing mini-potato farm on the floor of the HAB. Other than that, there wasn't a single problem in the entire HAB.

So an hour and a half later, I'm left to my thoughts. And, of course, my thoughts wander towards the most interesting thing to happen to me today. Which happens to be fanfiction about the first two men on the moon.

Hey, Johannsen, if you're reading this: What the actual fuck? 

Honestly, though, it's a break from 1970's movies, so I think tonight I'm gonna give it a try. Not in the sense that, like, I'm giving it a try as in… eugh. No. I just wanna try reading it, because, frankly, any new way to pass the time is more than welcome.

**LOG ENTRY: SOL 59 (3)**

I feel sick again! And it's Ao3 user Ellen54's fault!

“No Archive Warnings Apply.” Yeah, sure. There should have been a warning for “fanfiction that should literally have never existed.”

Okay, I should have known better than to keep reading when I saw the tags “Angst” and “Drunkenness” on an E-rated story with “Neil Armstrong/Buzz Aldrin” listed as a pairing. I should have known a LOT better than to keep reading when the preview has phrases like “the heat from Buzz's body starts to warm Neil's skin” and describing the descent of the LM as them “moving together in close quarters.”

Actually, before I get too far, I guess I should explain Ao3's rating system, in case whoever reads this log in the future had enough of a life in high school that they never had to scour old archives of fanfiction for stories about Star Trek.

So, to the left of the title, you'll see a grid of four different squares. Each square says something different about the fanfiction you're looking at.

The top left grid is a rating. The ratings go G for general, T for teenagers and older, M for mature, and E for explicit. (So no, E isn't “everyone,” in case anyone was wondering.) If it's blank, it means the person didn't rate it. M and E get used interchangably a lot, though, so if it's got either of those, there's a good chance you're about to open up a pornfic. Generally speaking, people rate porn, so if it's blank, you can assume that whatever it is, it isn't porn. (Also, sometimes people mark it M for gore and stuff, but you can generally tell the difference between that and porn from the description. I'll get to that in a moment.)

The top right is for pairings. This is where it gets slightly more tricky, although some of them are pretty understandable. Red with a Venus symbol? That's f/f, or female/female pairing. Blue with a Mars sign? M/M, or male/male pairing. If it's got a combination of the two and it's slightly purple in color, it's f/m, or female/male. Green with a sun symbol means there's no romance/porn, or at least that that's not the point of the story. Four squares means there's more than one kind of relationship, or that you've got yourself a story about more than two people in a relationship. Black with what looks like a little starship Enterprise? That's a type of relationship not listed above, like anything where one of the characters doesn't align with a male or female gender. Blank, and it's unsorted. This fanfiction has a Mars symbol (haha, very funny, Johannsen), so it's male/male.

Bottom left is content warnings. This section gets tricky. If you see a red exclamation point, it means it has one of a fair number of warnings, but the warnings don't really encompass everything that could be upsetting about a story, like “historical figure smut,” or even as simple as “domestic abuse.” (Have you ever had to close out of a story because there's no way in hell Kirk would hit his wife? No? Lucky you, then.) The warnings include things like rape, explicit violence, and major character death. Orange with a question mark and an exclamation point means that it could or could not have those warnings, or some other warning, but the author doesn't want to specify. Kind of a pointless label, in my opinion. Blank means it wasn't marked with any warnings, but honestly, that doesn't really mean much more than the orange one. And blue means the Archive itself archived it from an external source, and so warnings weren't listed through their own GUI in the process, but they're probably listed at the top of the fanfiction if you open it. Honestly, this whole square of the grid is kind of useless beyond the actual red exclamation point. It's blank for the moon sex fanfiction, so I guess neither of them straight up kills the other, and they're probably both into it. So that's a plus, at least. I don't know why EITHER of them would be into it enough to even ask the other if he was into it too, but at least the author chose to ignore reality enough to have them both want to have sex with each other. So I'll only be crying from the fact that this fanfiction exists when I'm reading it, and not something horrible and traumatic happening to Buzz Aldrin or something. Again, a plus.

Bottom right is whether or not it's done. Green check? It's done! Yay! The author's never coming back to visit it. Red veto? It's unfinished. And, now that Ao3 has been down for 50 years, you're never going to get an ending for it. Blank, and there's no way of knowing until you read it. This one's got a check, so at least there's no empty promise of more of this monstrosity. 4,918 words is as much as it's getting. Thank you, EntreNous, for never continuing your work.

So the title says it's by a user called nuestrascosas for user Ellen54, meaning Ellen here WANTED this written. Thank you, Ellen. I hope you were fucking satisfied.

The tags show that there's no warnings that apply (same as the box), that it's about Neil and Buzz (listed with a slash, where the term “slashfic” comes from, also confirms the m/m box), and that it involves “angst,” “drunkenness,” and “rivalry.” Which is already a lot to handle.

The description, though, is a snippet of the fanfiction, written in italics. I feel like it should have been my cue to turn back, given how… intimate they're trying to make it sound. But do I, Mark Watney, only human on Mars, turn back?

No!

Because I'm a fucking idiot!

And it's a Moonshot fanfiction. Was that a movie? Or a book? I think there was a book titled that written by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton.

If I die on Mars, and there's an afterlife, I'm kicking Al's and Deke's asses. They were responsible for this. IT WAS THEIR FAULT.

Anyways. So I didn't get very far in the story. It's so flowery, I can't really take it seriously. I mean, come on, probably-old-enough-to-be-my-mother-by-now fanfiction author. You're writing porn. Get over yourself. Also, the whole thing is written like it's supposed to be in a daze. I get that it was tagged “drunkenness,” but seriously, just because the characters are drunk doesn't mean the narrator has to be. (Although I guess it would make sense if the author was. I can't imagine putting effort into this sober. Granted, I also can't imagine ever writing anything good myself, but at least I can proudly say I've never written astronaut porn.)

Still, though. I literally, literally, never needed to read about whatever drunken passionate sexual attraction to Neil Armstrong that anyone would fantasize about Buzz Aldrin having for him.

I think I'm going to cry.

At least I cleaned out the water reclaimer, so my tears won't go to waste.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so the author of the original work appears to have orphaned the work. I mean. I can't particularly blame them for doing so. They're still active, too. So, since they don't want to be associated with the work, I've changed the username they're listed by in this fic.
> 
> The person the fic was listed for, though... their username didn't turn up anything on ao3. But it DID turn up something on lj, that... hasn't been active since 2014. I still changed the name they're listed as in this fic, though, in case there's a search option that I missed.


End file.
